Should Practitioners Use Western Counseling Techniques and Approaches, or CM, or Both? While the results of CM diagnostic techniques can be translated into insights useful to the emotional life of a person, the techniques of Western counseling are elucidated in this text and are no different for a patient in CM than in any other therapeutic situation. People are, after all, people. However, there are some qualifying considerations. One is culture. If one is treating people from outside one’s own culture one must recognize that issues that are relatively easy for one culture to address, might be intolerable to people from another culture. Examples For example, I did a bioenergetic workshop in London in 1971 in which one participant, a large man, who acknowledged his anger, could not express it by pounding a pillow and instead recited the following poem: Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. (“Invictus,” 1875, by William Earnest Henley5) In China in 1981, shortly after the “official” end of the Cultural Revolution, I encountered tremendous repressed rage in the patients in the hospital where I worked. This would have been a quick death sentence for anyone who dared to express it, even to members of family or close friends, because everyone was spying on each other. Another example might include the danger of encouraging a Moslem woman to express openly or act upon her sexual or even educational longing. The list of such cautions is as endless as the difference in cultures.
Answer by Dr. Hammer
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Should Practitioners Cope with “Difficult” Patients?
Can Practitioners Provide Nourishment to People Who Lacked it Early in Life?
Can Practitioners Extract the Essential or Correct from the Less Important or Incorrect?
Should Practitioners Inform Important Others, Spouse, Parents, Relatives, and Other Therapists?
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